Blogg

Her finner du nyheter fra prosjektet. Here you can find our project news.

  • Cross-Cultural Childhood Belonging and Popular Culture in the Digital Age
    by Amina Ally Often experiences of having a multicultural identity are based on adult memories of childhood rather than the direct experiences of children themselves. These are often memories of being caught between cultures, and feelings of losing a sense of belonging. There are challenges answering questions such as “where are you from”, and “who …
  • New perspectives on children’s belonging
    End seminar and book launch with results from research project Belong – Practices and policies of belonging among minority and majority children of low-income families. Event location: Litteraturhuset, Wergelandsveien 29, Kverneland Date/Time: 6 June 2025 08:30 to 10:00 Sign Up here (Nettskjema) In this seminar, renowned sociologists Allison Pugh and Vanessa May will share insights …
  • The Digital Youth Club – The Meeting Between the Welfare State and Gaming Culture
    Karolin Moberg Youth and Their Digital Lives Youth are increasingly living their lives on digital platforms, and gaming culture has become a significant part of the upbringing of children and teenagers in the Norwegian welfare state. Access to technological communication and digital arenas has become a natural part of growing up and is necessary for …
  • Ny masteroppgave om helsesykepleieres arbeid med skoletilhørighet
    Signe Beate Sveen Andresen leverte sin masteroppgave i helsevitenskap, studieretning helsesykepleie, våren 2024, med tittelen «Skoletilhørighet blant barn i familier med vedvarende lavinntekt. En kvalitativ intervjustudie av helsesykepleieres erfaringer fra skolehelsetjenesten i Oslo».   Studien er begrunnet i forskning som viser at det er en sammenheng mellom barns psykososiale helse, skoletilhørighet og gjennomføring av skolegang. Da …
  • «Barns tilhørighet blant mennesker og ting» – ny fagbok om barn og unges tilhørighetspraksiser
    Hva vil det egentlig si å føle seg hjemme i en verden i stadig endring? Hvordan påvirker klær, mat og steder våre relasjoner – og vår følelse av tilhørighet? Til våren lanseres en ny bok basert på Belong-prosjektet som utforsker barn og unges komplekse opplevelser av tilhørighet. Gjennom levende eksempler viser boka hvordan mennesker, steder og materielle ting former følelsen av fellesskap og det å høre til. Fra skolegårdens dynamikk til digitale mediers innflytelse, illustrerer boka hvordan gjenstander, steder og sosiale bånd spiller en avgjørende rolle når barn og unge forhandler sin identitet og søker fellesskap. credit: pexels | olia danile
  • Consuming cultural spaces and young people’s sense of belonging  
    by Kostas Theodoridis  Young people live in a world characterised by multiple crises and global emergencies in which a sense of belonging is increasingly difficult to achieve. Younger generations have experienced extreme levels of uncertainty in the context of the Global Financial Crisis and during the Covid-19 crisis. In addition, the digitalisation of young people’s …
  • Religion og tilhørighet
    Skrevet av Hildegunn Valen Kleive | Høgskulen i Volda At religion kunne fungere som lim i samfunnet, altså som noe som skapte fellesskap og tilhørighet, var noe de aller tidligste samfunnsforskerne la merke til.  Likevel dabbet interessen for religion i samfunnsforskningen gradvis ut. Årsakene til det er sammensatt, men en grunn var forestillingen om at …
  • “I don’t say I am Norwegian”: Belonging and ethnic/racial categories
    by Mari Rysst In this blog I will address the phenomenon of social classification, here related to experience-near ethnic and racial categories among 12-year-old children in a suburb in eastern Oslo. This suburb has a majority population of families from non-western countries. In Norway as a whole, people from non-western countries are often categorized as …
  • «Det er Nike som er greia»: Om merkeklær og nesten merkeklær
    by Mari Rysst I 2022 skrev jeg et innlegg på denne bloggen medtittel «Viktigheten av tingens skjulte betydning», der jeg, i lys av AllisonPughs begrep ‘economy of dignity’, konkluderte med at  «de unge selv vet hva ting «betyr», hva deter viktig å ha og ikke ha for å oppleve tilhørighet. Vi voksne må forståviktigheten av …
  • Belong sluttseminar: Vanessa May og Allison Pugh kommer
    Vanessa May og Allison Pugh kommer på Belongs sluttseminar Datoen for Belongs sluttseminar er 6. juni 2025. Så langt har de internasjonalt anerkjente tilhørighetsforskerne Vanessa May og Allison Pugh takket ja til å foredra. I tillegg vil vi presentere smakebiter fra en bok (antologi) med den foreløpige tittelen «Barns tilhørighet blant mennesker og ting». Boken …
  • Belonging and Group Cohesion: The Power of Emplacement and Multisensory Experiences in Organized Youth Sports in Norway
    by Marianna Melenteva  How can sports change lives of children and youth? One could easily assume that the question is somewhat elementary. However, in Norway, sports aren’t just about competition or entertainment. While politics play sports into a social platform addressing inequality and promoting social inclusion, this does not tell us all that much about …
  • Behind the Screens – The Unseen Marketing
    by Hanna Seglem Tangen What do we know about what youth see on their mobile phone? Our mobile phones and social media are highly private and mostly for good reasons. It is our own alternative and digital world. Youth spend hours and hours daily on their mobile phones exploring this world. Unfortunately, there are some …
  • How do smartphones shape belonging in a digitalized childhood?
    by Øyvind Næss In Norway, when something is said to have an ‘affective value’ (affeksjonsverdi), it is meant to convey how a thing can have a value that is disconnected from its economic or practical value within a system of exchange. Therefore, ‘affective value’ is a subjective value that always exists in a relation to …
  • Up and-coming belonging and youth research
    Monika Marie Bergflødt Read on and learn more about the exciting research of PhD candidate Monika Marie Bergflødt. Place Attachment and Identity Exploration in Youth’s Everyday Lives In recent years, there has been a surge in gendered narratives about boys and girls growing up in neighborhoods facing reputational challenges. The stories often revolve around minority …
  • From digital playground to dark patterns
    by Clara J. Reich & Kamilla Knutsen Steinnes Video games are important social arenas for children and adolescents in Norway. Playing video games is one of the most popular leisure activities (Medietilsynet, 2022) where young people can meet and hang out with their friends, have fun, learn new skills, feel a sense of belonging, relax, …
  • Stedstilhørighet og lovovertredelser
    Anita Borch Luam Kebreab har vært knyttet til Belong-prosjektet der hun våren -23 leverte sin masteroppgave i barnevern ved OsloMet – storbyuniversitet, Fakultet for samfunnsvitenskap. Oppgaven har tittelen «Oppfatninger om lovovertredelser og deres årsaksforklaringer. Kvalitative intervjuer av unge i Oslo øst». Kebreab ble engasjert av Belong-prosjektet for å studere sammenhengen mellom lovovertredelser og tilhørighet blant …
  • Sharenting in Norway
    hildren in Norway will have on average 1165 pictures of themselves on the Internet by the time they are 12 years old, according to UNICEF (2020). This shows that a lot of content is shared about children in Norway, often by their family members and friends. The practice of parents sharing information about their children is referred to as sharenting, a termderived from the words sharing and parenting.
  • School belonging
    by Mathilde Bjørnset – OsloMet Children spend more and more time in school. By the turn of the 20th century, many countries had made schooling compulsory, as mass schooling had accompanied the industrial revolution (Leonard, 2016). In Norway, there has been a drastic increase in yearly teaching hours from 6,904 in 1997 to 7,686 in …
  • To game is to belong
    In August 2023, my colleague, Kamilla Knutsen Steinnes, and I published a SIFO report addressing male gamers’ (16-18 y.o.a.) relationship to loot boxes (Borch and Steinnes, 2023). Lootboxes can be defined as “mystery packages” of digital content in video games that give them advantages (e.g., skills like being stronger and running faster) or cosmetic items (e.g., a nice sword or  shining armour) for use within the context of the game. Most lootboxes cost money. If so, gamers spend sums of money for a chance to receive a desirable reward (Forbrukerrådet (FR), 2022).
  • Children’s unequal use of digital technology – the nuanced role of (socioeconomic) context
    During the 2010s, three interconnected developments have increased the significance of such questions for families: First, the introduction of portable touchscreen devices has enabled children to engage with ICTs long before they acquire reading and writing skills. These mobile devices can be used in various settings, both inside and outside the home, such as in the backseat of a car, at a restaurant, or in a waiting room.
  • Bli kjent med Signe vår nye masterstudent i Belong
    Hvem er du? Jeg heter Signe Sveen Andresen, er 25 år og utdannet sykepleier siden 2021. Nå studerer jeg master i helsevitenskap, studieretning helsesykepleie ved OsloMet. Jeg blir ferdig utdannet helsesykepleier til jul 2023, og skal skrive masteroppgave våren 2024. Ved siden av studier tar jeg ekstravakter som sykepleier ved Oslo Universitetssykehus.  Hva skal du …
  • How can smart home devices affect belonging at home?
    Belonging is often described as a feeling of being at home. In this blog post, I will explore this by looking at how smart home devices may affect this feeling among people who are not particularly invested in them.
  • To belong or not belong in political discourse
    A while ago, an intense debate flared up between some of Sweden’s leading newspaper columnists.
  • What is belonging and why is it important?
    Belonging is a sense of ease with oneself and with the surrounding world, often likened to a feeling of being ‘at home’.
  • Theorizing Belonging from the perspective of young former refugees
    Tina Mathisen How do young former refugees go about to create place attachment and belonging in a new home place while at the same time maintaining attachments to other home places? And what does the concept of belonging entail theoretically speaking? These were questions I was grappling with during my doctoral research together with youth …
  • On Belonging, Sameness and Difference
    Allison J. Pugh About two decades ago, I spent three years listening to and observing children in elementary school in Oakland, California.  At the time, there was a hue and cry about the commercialization of childhood, and a widespread fear of children’s rising materialism.  But what I found instead was that children most often used consumer goods to connect to others rather than to dominate them.  In fact, children lived in what I came to call an “economy of dignity,” in which particular goods and experiences served as currency, or, to use another metaphor, as passports for their social citizenship.  Children relied on particular goods like electronic games to signal to each other that they were part of the same group – and if they did not possess the goods that mattered, they strived to accumulate knowledge about those goods so they could position themselves as culturally fluent in their local environment.  As I wrote in the book that came out of this research, their ultimate goal, the target of all this deployment of goods and knowledge, was establishing themselves as full citizens in their social world: in other words, their belonging.[1]
  • Children’s engagement with and belonging to their environments.
    Asher Ben-Arieh Recent years have brought focus to the importance of understanding context when approaching the topic of child wellbeing, with both theoretical and empirical evidence mounting to support this movement (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Coulton & Spilsbury, 2014). Whilst research has most typically investigated the contexts of family, school, and socioeconomic status when studying children (Goswami, 2012; Lee & Yoo, 2015; Gross-Manos & Massarwi, 2022), this contribution, premised on children’s rights and their participatory perspective, emphasizes the importance of also exploring the environment and nature as contexts which shape children’s lives.
  • Pay-to-play? Belonging through consumption in commercial games
    Kamilla Knutsen Steinnes Children and adolescents are visible and connect to others through things, both tangible and intangible. That is, consumption plays an integral part in belonging. Belonging in peer groups may take place in social arenas, such as physical locations or abstract contexts – like virtual gaming platforms. Playing video games is currently the …
  • Leisure time troubles
    Markus Lynum For some, socialization, and the formation of both strong and weak ties with others seem to come around as a natural part of the life course and provide them with a sense of belonging. By having to nurture relations with family, peers and other role models in their immediate social surroundings, children may …
  • Design for Belonging: Innovation with Space, Ritual, and Roles
    Blog post by Dr. Susie Wise Belonging is a fundamental human need. We need to feel we belong in order to play together, to learn, and to work. Designing for belonging is deeply about equity. It is about ensuring that all people, especially those furthest from opportunity, have what they need to thrive. Belonging, without …
  • On the implicit policy of the term “belonging”
    author: Anita Borch In social theory, the term “belonging” refers to a sense of ease; of “fitting in” in our immediate social context – be it people, places, or materials. For most of us belonging is positive, providing us with a sense of confidence and trust in the world, triggering us to believe in ourselves …
  • The first paper of the BELONG project has been launched
    Anita Borch The first article on the BELONG project has recently been launched. It is entitled “Immigrant Children’s Connections to People and the World Around Them: A Critical Discourse Review of Academic Literature” and is published in the journal Social Inclusion. The article describes the main characteristics of highly cited research on the connections of …
  • Bli kjent med våre masterstudenter
    Fem spørsmål og svar med våre masterstudenter Luam Kebreab og Anja Elton Proskurnicki i Belong prosjektet. Hvem er du? Hva studerer/jobber du? Mitt navn er Luam Kebreab. Jeg er utdannet sosionom, og jeg tar master i sosialfag, retning barnevern nå. Jeg jobber deltid i en barnevernsinstitusjon ved siden av studiene. Hva skal du skrive masteroppgaven om? …
  • Children as experts.The Children’s Worlds Survey and its potential
    Sabine Andresen and Asher Ben-Arieh Children are experts. They have knowledge, experience and opinions, but they are often not listened to. With the help of the children’s rights approach, the scientific interest in children and their role as experts is changing. In recent years there has been a growing interest among international researchers, policy makers …
  • Using visual methodologies to explore children’s sense of belonging
    by Henry Mainsah In the Belong project we seek to explore how children negotiate a sense of belonging by looking at how they relate to places, social relationships, and things. This implies that we must map the social world of children in their material and socio-spatial contexts such as home, school, and online, and through …
  • Garderobestudier i BELONG
    Ingrid Haugsrud & Ingun Grimstad Klepp Når 9-åringen Lucy går inn i klesskapet i Narnia-bøkene finner hun et snødekt landskap og en fantastisk, men litt skummel verden. Storesøsknene tror henne først ikke når hun forteller om hva hun har oppdaget, men blir overbevist og blir med henne inn. I garderobene vi i BELONG titter inn …
  • Untangling the complex relationship between poverty and belonging using Ungdata Junior
    Christer Hyggen, Mette Løvgren A significant number of Norwegian children are growing up in families at risk of poverty. The number has been on the rise for the last two decades. As we speak about 12 percent of all Norwegian children grow up in households at risk of poverty. While poverty in Norway does not …
  • Viktigheten av tingenes «skjulte» betydning
    Mari Rysst Viktigheten av tingenes «skjulte» betydningI 2005 publiserte jeg en artikkel i Tidsskrift for Ungdomsforskning med tittel Det koster å være kul. Om tweenagers opplevelse av tilhørighet i en flerkulturell setting i Oslo. Artikkelen var basert på etnografisk feltarbeid i en bydel i Oslo øst, og diskuterer 10-årige gutter og jenters vennskapsrelasjoner med vekt …
  • BELONG på mastertorget 2022  
    Anita Borch presenterte BELONG prosjektet og muligheter for å skrive masteroppgave på OsloMets mastertorget 10. februar 2022. Det var åtte studenter som meldte sin interesse for å være knyttet til prosjektet og Anita hadde fire samtaler med fire av dem. Tema for to oppgaver er allerede bestemt. Den ene skal handle om hvordan tyverier av …
  • Ballkjolen
    Eivind Jacobsen Der henger den, innerst i skapet. Når jeg tar den ut og henger den på knaggen flommer den utover, lyseblå tyll, fotsid uten alt for mange paljetter, en prinsesse eller en Askepott verdig. Vi er på loftet, min datter flytter ut, har fått seg sitt eget sted, og mamma og pappa hjelper litt …
  • The Belong project’s impact and user groups
    “Relevance” and “impact” are two words with increasing significance for researchers around the world promoted by the European Commission to “better align science and society”. When we applied for research grants in spring 2020, we had to convince the commission evaluating our proposal that our project is relevant in the sense of addressing a grand, …
  • Kick-Off Meeting
    The BELONG project’s kick-off meeting took place on the 30th and 31st of August at OsloMet with keynotes speakers and guests attending online.The kick-off seminar started with a warm welcome from project leader Anita Borch and was followed by inspiring keynotes on the concept of belonging and children’s belonging both in Norway and on an …
  • Kort om BELONG
    Tilhørighet blant minoritets- og majoritetsbarn i lavinntektsfamilier (BELONG) Prosjektet skal studere 12-åringers tilhørighet til blant annet mennesker, steder og ting for å få kunnskap om hvorfor noen faller utenfor samfunnet i voksen alder. Et viktig mål for velferdsstaten Norge er at alle barn skal ha en trygg og god oppvekst. Studier indikerer imidlertid at andelen …